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| Book cover for "One Coin Found" |
I read the book One Coin Found: How God's Love Stretches to the Margins by Emmy Kegler (published in 2019), and it was great!
Kegler grew up in a mainline Christian tradition, and she didn't see any reason why her faith would have any kind of problem with the fact that she is a lesbian. But in the Christian circles she moved in- especially the ones which were more evangelical, and especially as she worked to become a pastor- well, it's more complicated than that. The overall structure of the book is about her life, but with plenty of asides where she preaches about the nature of God, the bible, etc, from a progressive/queer Christian perspective. It's so good.
I want to quote a section of the book, about communion. ("Communion" is also called "Eucharist" in some Christian traditions.) She was at a church service for college students, and was dragged into volunteering because they needed extra help. This is from pages 89-96:
Suddenly someone pushed a ceramic plate into my hands. It was heavy and cool, the polished rim pressing into my palms, the molasses bread upon it fresh from baking that morning. I looked down at the dark cross pressed into the loaf and immediately looked back up at the stranger who had handed me the plate. "I can't," I said, apologetic but clear.
...
"I can't serve," I repeated. "I'm not trained." I tried to hand off the plate to the closest possible person-- one of the campus pastors. ...
He took a moment, observing the situation as I held the plate out, my eyes declaring my unwillingness to be complicit in the unrighteousness being forced upon me. He half-took the plate back, and then peered at me again and asked: "Do you know what to say?"
I swallowed, and carefully answered, "T-the body of Christ, given for you."
He let go of the plate, and the full weight of it fell back into my hands. "There you go. You've been trained."
It could be that Pastor Benson simply needed to get one more set of hands ready. Perhaps his comment was not meant to be a theological assessment of the nature of the Eucharist. But in every moment since, in all that I have understood of Lutheran proclamation and practice, I have not yet found a sentence to better summarize what communion is.
...
... But in the act of communion, in the promise from priest to believer that "this is the body of Christ, given for you," something grander than memory or symbol was taking place. Christ was fully present, impossibly so, in that moment of sacramental promise.
The transformation of the elements or the memory of the Last Supper became background for the work not of the priests or the believer but of Jesus: to be powerfully present in the moment of the Eucharist. An unworthy priest could still consecrate; an unworthy believer could still receive. It was not about the virtue, the knowledge, even the faith of the people involved; Luther saw humanity as far too fallible to bear that burden. It was Jesus's promise, Jesus's power in which the beauty of communion rested.
From the day that plate first rested in my hands, the promise of sacramental union rang true for me. The training that the church of my childhood had required was worthwhile, no question; if we were truly handling the body and blood of Christ, it was better to do it with reverence. But it was not required. I was a baptized and beloved child of God; the rest was the work of Christ. The promise of Christ's real presence expanded the bread and wine beyond what I could hold. In the crumbs there was a proclamation of an impossibly expansive God.
The God present in the bread was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery, who had broken the bonds of oppression and wealth and power to lead them across the sea on dry land. The God in my hands was the God who had sent quails to cover the camp at night and frost to cover it at dawn, the God who had left thin wafers of bread across the sand of the camp, the God who chuckled when the Israelites picked up the fine flaky substance and said to each other, "What is this? What is this?" This was the bread of impossibility, the bread of the promise that God could provide, that work and work and work and work was not the path to salvation or protection. Manna, the bread of the wilderness. This was the bread that made no sense and yet was there six days of each week for over two thousand weeks, skipping each Sabbath with a terrifying regularity, reminding the people again and again to rest. Each stale wafer that stuck to the roof of my mouth held the God who had fed the chosen people both with food and with freedom.
The God who found me in the communion chalice was the God who inaugurated his ministry with ridiculous abundance, with rich red wine at a wedding where everyone was already drunk. The God now held in my shaking, sweaty hands was the God who drank and ate with sinners. This was the God who had smiled with quiet pleasure at the religious expert who failed to understand the offensive nature of mercy, a God whose human feet had been washed by a woman with wet eyes and trembling hands. As Simon the Pharisee glared at the offense of a sinful woman at the feet of Jesus, this God had interrupted his internal rant. This God who I now held in my hands had proclaimed the nature of salvation: "She has anointed my feet with oil. Therefore her many sins have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love." What came first, I wondered, the forgiveness or the love? The mercy or the response to mercy? The bread or the body?
Yes, communion answered me. There was no before and after. There was no twelve-step process to my betterment before the table of the Lord. There was no demand for perfect faith, for full comprehension, for my ultimate sanctification before I could be found worthy. Christ was there, waiting for me, the timeless Divine choosing to be bound in this moment. It was all there, element and substance together, the twinkling bright eyes of Pastor Benson as his fingers gripped the bread: The body of Christ, given for you.
On the first Easter, the day of impossibility, the first day the women and disciples could do anything besides sit and grieve, there was broken bread. The women had come and told their truth: an open tomb, a body missing, a flash of light, and two messengers with a proclamation: "He is not here, but has risen." The women had run to find the disciples, their words tumbling over each other, gasping with the exertion and elation and shock. But the men had shaken their heads, disillusioned or even disgusted with another set of women's foolish talk and idle tales. And so two had set off to Emmaus, a seven-mile journey, mournfully chewing over the morning's events, throwing questions and disappointments back and forth as they walked. "We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel," they told a stranger who met them on the way, and the stranger laughed and called them mindless and slow-hearted. Moses and all the prophets had confessed to this coming prophet, his life and death and resurrection, and the stranger walked alongside them on the journey.
And in a flash, over a simple dinner, the truth was known: the women's witness was no old wives' tale. Christ was alive, risen from the dead, freed from the tomb; he was known to them in the breaking of bread.
God was there, big enough to fit into a sip of wine, close enough to hold.
God was here. My job was to get out of the way.
I served the bread that day. My hands were so sweaty that I vacillated wildly between the fear I'd be struck dead by lightning for serving without proper training and the fear that I'd drop the plate. Neither happened, and I have barely let go of serving the bread ever since. I will freely confess that I may have been excessively captured by the revelation of the real presence of Christ.
I have been finding new and complicated layers to the communion experience since that day. Years later, when I was serving communion in a Lutheran church off-campus, a parent pulled me aside before church to explain that her children would be receiving communion today, thank you very much. I blinked at her. "I know the teaching of the church is that you have to understand before you can receive," she went on, "but do any of us really understand what's happening at communion?"
This mother's proclamation baffled me. None of this was about understanding, I thought. Who could understand what was happening here? Who has said we need to try? The promise isn't of understanding but of presence, not ours but God's. That was the entire launch-point of Luther-- that it was the work of Jesus, and nothing of our own righteousness, that saved us.
The conclusion was singular and obvious. "Of course they'll receive," I answered.
Yes, what Kegler describes in this book is the Christianity I believe in. And reading this passage about communion, it gives me all kinds of feelings, about how I miss communion and other embodied/physical/sensory religious experiences.
Growing up evangelical, we always said the important thing was your beliefs, and whether you "really meant it"- that this was what really mattered, not rituals and traditions. In fact, we regarded Catholics and other "liturgical" Christian groups very suspiciously- we thought they were just "going through the motions" of doing all these traditions, but it didn't mean anything. We said what really mattered was your own personal faith and relationship with God. Your feelings and beliefs, not the religious rituals.
And back then, taking communion (ie, eating the little wafer and drinking the grape juice) was about making myself feel really bad about my sin and Jesus' death. Getting myself into the right emotional state- manufacturing the emotions- regret and guilt and how bad and unworthy I am.
But now I see it completely differently. I don't go to church, so I don't really ever get to have communion, and on the rare occasions that I happen to go to church (like when I'm visiting my parents), if it's the week that we do communion, I really look forward to it. Because it's an actual embodied action. Something I do, concrete, the action is right there in the tangible real world, regardless of what anyone thinks or believes or feels or "really means" about it. Maybe I *don't* have the right feelings or faith or understanding, but regardless, I eat the little wafer and experience God. God comes down to us. Who can say if you had the "right" attitude or the "right" feelings or "really meant it"- what does that even mean? But you did eat the wafer and drink the juice- you can know that for sure. Experiencing God through real actions rather than constantly psychoanalyzing yourself.
I've heard that it's common for ex-evangelical Christians to end up joining more "liturgical" churches, ie, churches that have more structured traditions and rituals. (Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Rachel Held Evans.) During the time we were evangelical, we spent so much emotional energy agonizing over if our feelings were the right feelings, if we "really meant it"- our worship and our faith didn't "count" if on some level we didn't "really mean it." But in liturgical churches it's not like that. Regardless of what you feel or what you "really mean," you go through the actions of the church service. You are there and you are doing it, and that is good enough. You can stop worrying.
I miss having these embodied religious experiences. Now, I mostly just think about Jesus all the time and write about Christianity on the internet. And I feel I experience God in a lot of things, in the beauty of the world, in human connection, things like that. But I really miss the kinds of sensory experiences you have in a church-y environment. Communion, singing worship songs, kneeling to pray. I guess I could do some of that on my own, but also it feels silly, like 'oh if I kneel down and think about God, then God will give me some kind of meaningful feeling,' it feels really silly and gimmicky. Feels like I just made it up, so why am I acting like it means something? I suppose in church it's also like that- the organizers of the church service set up the environment to be a certain way and give people the feeling of connecting with God. Maybe that's also gimmicky.
But there really is something to the idea of feeling with your body, rather than just thinking and talking and believing.
I really miss that, and it feels really personal to say so. I'm queer. I'm ex-evangelical. I know that evangelicals would say I'm not a real Christian, if they knew. And to attempt to feel God in physical, sensory ways, to openly show my desire for Them... I don't feel safe doing that in a church. Why would I show people how I really feel about God, if they don't even believe I'm a Christian? (See: Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival")
Anyway. I liked this book, "One Coin Found," and this section about communion was my favorite part. Religion as something you do with your body. God comes down to us and we can experience God, even if our feelings/beliefs are not "right."
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Related:
"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me"
No One Can Take The Bible From Me
Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"
