A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on December 14th, 2007 in Progressive Faith

More politic-laden Gospel messages today.

Today is also known as Sans Day, or Saint They’s Day (possibly Saint Kea or Kay. You can hear the Sans Day Carol here and the words are here.

Perhaps it is in recognition of the stories of Kea forging peace that today’s meditation is on the grace of communion. Understanding communion is useful in understanding Communion.

If one rejects the idea that transmogrification takes place and the Eucharist doesn’t actually offer the real body and blood of Christ, then some meaning needs to be brought to the practice to protect it from becoming a hollow observance of rank religiousity. As Jenny Te Paa writes:

Communion, as I witness it and as I have experienced it throughout my lifetime, is us, embodied in and for each other across the endless chasms of distance and difference. Communion is both noun and verb – it names both who we are and what we do. Communion is thus simultaneously the recognition of our common humanity, and the relationality that that presupposes – it is about us all being created equally of God, equally as it is our responsive embrace of God in each other. It is therefore our way of loving and our responsibility for loving, just as we ourselves are loved so unconditionally by God. Communion is thus us living out in the deepest and most intimate forms of Christlike relationality what we say, even as we pray, that we deeply, truly believe in one God, in one Lord Jesus Christ, in one holy and apostolic church.

For me, taking part in the Eucharist is an attempt to connect myself to those who came before me, who gave the best they had to give to discover the divine within us all and to honor that place from which it came. The wine and bread do not need any magical powers to transform us. They just need to be able to touch some part of us that understands that, in religion as well as in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants. But while we are beholden to them for passing along the sum of their knowledge, we are not expected to confine ourselves by their findings. Rather we are charged with using the best of what they have bequeathed to us as a means of moving our faith into modern times and making it relevant to the world around us.

Te Paa concludes:

So in all of this I am wondering at the possibilities of us all recommitting not only to imagining the seemingly elusive place of wonder, but to beginning this day in our own spheres of influence to seeing, understanding, living and celebrating communion as being the sum total of all of us as faith filled ordinary Anglican men and women whose lives and whose loves are prescribed by a prior sense of sacred belonging to God and thus to one another. In this we share therefore in an unbreakable commitment to the indisputably inclusive Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Peace on earth, goodwill to men. All men. All the earth. We can only hope while we bend our back to the work at hand.