I have been thinking a lot about rituals this week and their meaning. Rituals are such an important part of how humans make meaning and make sense of life. It is how we tell our story. It is how we put together various strands of life and purpose and understanding and symbol and sign. Rituals are often shaped and rooted in religious settings and language and have become such an important part of our faith life. Often there is an understood structure and a set of words or actions to accompany the ritual, and often very physical, tangible, embodied elements or symbols. Rituals re-connect us with God and our human story. In rituals, we place our human story within the larger story of God in tangible and earthy, embodied ways.
This week, I have been present to two funerals, both the tragic Waterloo North double funeral on Tuesday of Jennie and Zoe Wiebe, and the funeral here on Friday for Eva Martin, our long-time member and friend. Both funerals helped those present to process these deaths of loved ones. It was so important to gather as a community, to sing, to pray, to tell story, to see caskets or urns or photos, to witness to the presence of God, and to ritualize what we were doing together. Rituals gives us a framework to hold our grief, to surround our deepest emotions no matter what they are, to attempt to make meaning and find hope, and to invite God to hold us. Last Sunday we had the wonderful ritual of membership as 9 people joined our congregation, and so we had the witness of faith partners, the prayers of the congregation, the signing of a covenant and the presenting of certificates and candles, as symbols of what we were doing. This morning we will share the ritual of communion together – and we see the table set already before us – bread and cup.
Rituals are also on my mind because of the AMBS Zoom class I am teaching right now on Thursday nights to 6 seminary students on youth and young adults. The topic this week was on rituals and narratives, with a key assigned reading being from a book called ‘Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals: Weaving Together the Human and the Divine.’ (Hebert Anderson and Edward Fowley, San Fransisco, CA, Jossey-Bass, 2001), which shares how we weave a web of stories together to form personal and collective narratives, and that these form ‘rituals that are essential and powerful means for making the world a habitable and hospitable place.’ (p.55) They argue that rituals need to be honest and authentic – to name and accept contradictions and nuance and pain, and yet they also provide hope and promise. Rituals disconnected to people’s real lives have no soul. Rituals, when done well, invoke mighty stories, and are indeed ‘dangerous’ in that they set us on new paths that transform our lives. In the second half of the class, I invited in 5 Mennonite pastors from across North America to reflect on ‘Whatever happened to baptism?’ and had a fascinating conversation on the state of baptism right now among youth and young adults, and how many are not choosing baptism, but also the power that this ritual can have in lives when given room to flourish, often in new ways, and formats and different creative journeys to get there in our time. The final project at the end of the class is for the students is to create and describe a meaningful ritual that they could use with a group of youth or young adults. A perfect example of that in our setting would be the ritual we have developed around Meals that Matter, which Levi will be leading over lunch today with our young adults at Rachel Willms’ home.
Rituals are also on my mind because of our Anabaptism at 500 services of renewal. Core to the early Anabaptist movement was a dispute and radical re-interpreting of some of the key rituals of the Christian faith – a challenging of the Catholic sacraments of baptism and communion. The early Anabaptists called these signs and symbols or ordinances, not sacraments, that did not need to be mediated by the priests of the church. Baptism was a response to the Holy Spirit as those who could understand and live into this commitment, and so they practiced adult baptism or believer’s baptism, something that got them into big trouble, because their children were no longer beholden to the state through their child baptisms. They often spoke of a threefold baptism, the inner baptism first by the Holy Spirit, then the outward confession of baptism within the community in water, and, finally, for the more than 4000 martyrs, baptism of blood, a literal dying with Christ. (C.A. Snyder, From Anabaptist Seed, Pandora Press, 1999, p.24-27). What followed then was a new definition of the ritual of communion or the Lord’s Supper. Arnold Snyder describes the understanding this way: The ‘Anabaptists rejected the idea that there was a real, bodily presence of Christ in the elements of bread and wine. (transubstantiation) The bread, they said, was just bread, and the wine was just wine. The Lord’s supper was a memorial to be celebrated by baptized and disciplined believers, not a recreation of Christ’s sacrifice to be done by priests on behalf of sinners.’ (Ibid, p.31) With a priesthood of all believers, you served each other communion, on an equal basis, which is the format we will have chosen to do today by gathering around small circles, also serving each other. The early Anabaptist with maybe the best name, Balthasar Hubmaier, wrote ‘The bread and wine are nothing but memorial symbols of Christ’s suffering and death.’ (Ibid, p. 31). The early Anabaptists brought in a whole new way to understand and to enact these 2 key Christan rituals.
The key basis in Scripture are the words of institution itself, which Brent read for us, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ – Communion is a remembrance. We remember. I remember. It is not like the early Anabaptists did not take communion seriously. In fact, there was a whole process of self-examination, to make sure that the supper was practiced in a worthy way, picking up the verses that surround the 1 Corinthians 11 passage, where believers are to eat in a worthy way examining themselves, and where Paul addresses abuses at the Table, where the rich were eating before the poor. There is a memory in this congregation of preparatory services the week before communion, and making sure you had reconciled any differences with other believers before coming to the table. But the early Anabaptists also saw communion as a powerful sign of renewed commitment to the fellowship, being a part of the community of believers. In communion, we remember the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, in community, and in commitment to our faith.
I have been so struck by those words ‘I remember. We remember.’ Our communion practices have shifted and changed over the years, and yet always, in communion, we remember. One of the powerful things about rituals, is that they layer meaning after meaning, and story after story over time. Each time we partake in communion, we remember Jesus, we remember our early Anabaptist forbearers, we remember the history of communion in this place, in our community, and we remember the many and diverse personal experiences we have had with communion in our lives and our memories. Two summers ago, in our worship series on ‘Follow the Bread Crumbs,’ we heard different people each Sunday share their personal communion stories, each filled with such meaning and memory. We remember. And so as we prepare for communion this morning, I invite us to do some remembering, as I share what I remember as we prepare for today’s sharing of communion.
• I remember the life of Jesus, where he paused before what he knew would be his last hours on earth, to share the simple gift of bread and wine with his disciples, so that they would remember him when he was gone, and when times would get tough.
• I remember the disciples on the road to the Emmaus with a stranger, whose hearts were burning within them as he broke bread, and vanished from their sight.
• I remember the early Anabaptists, where communion was often a matter of life and death, and where they re-defined the Lord’s supper as sign and symbol.
• I remember the great cloud of witnesses over the centuries who have joined in this profound ritual, from so many Christian traditions, however it has been practiced, and received the strength they needed to live out their faith each day.
• I remember being a child at First Mennonite Church in Edmonton, and being enamored by the congregation eating these little carefully cut cubes of bread and small cups of juice after they were passed down each pew, and looking forward to when I might do that someday, something I did soon after my baptism. In communion I remember my baptism.
• I remember the first time serving communion here at SJMC, and having each row stand to receive the elements as the servers came to their row, something new to me that spoke to a level of commitment, of standing up for one’s faith… and then that satisfying clinking of all the communion cups being put into the wooden pew holders.
• I remember watching some folks new to SJMC from other congregations, receive their bread on a piece of white cloth, reminding me of the holiness of this ritual.
• I remember coming forward in two lines to the front of this church, to the foot of the cross, on an Easter morning to receive communion for the second time that weekend as a joyful sign of the new life given to us, a few days after our Good Friday communion of remembering Jesus’ death on the cross.
• I remember as a young adult, at the 1990 Mennonite World Conference in Winnipeg, receiving little grape creamers to use for communion as we joined more than 20,000 Mennonites from around the world on a Sunday morning in the Winnipeg Stadium, where I had watched CFL football games.
• I remember many years later being invited by pastoral intern Ben Smith to stand with him at Mennonite World Conference in Paraguay to receive communion for the first time after his recent baptism, and being overwhelmed and teary eyed, witnessing the global church all around us that we were all a part of.
• I remember as well, 3 weeks later, being with our smaller, more intimate AMBS !Explore travel group of youth and their pastors in a Mennonite colony in the Chaco, and serving each other communion in a circle, where we needed to use guarana pop instead of grape juice because that’s all there way, and knowing that where two or three, or maybe 30 gather, God is present.
• I remember the conversations we had here at SJMC a number of years ago, where we discerned together that statement on communion you find in your bulletins, that recognizes that this is God’s table of welcome, not ours, with Jesus as the host, and that all who come to the table will be welcomed and served, children, those on a journey towards baptism – a more inclusive table than the early Anabaptists. May these good gifts of God draw us ever deeper into lives of faithfulness and discipleship.
• I remember being at a Pastor’s Week communion at Grebel where the gluten free poppy seed bread disintegrated in the common cup of juice before our eyes, or a time at the Laurelville Music and Worship retreat where the little pandemic wafer and cups were not easily opened and grape juice squirted all over, and in both cases people where soon filled with tears of laughter, reminding me of the joy of communion and that the joy of the Lord is our strength.
• I remember watching our pre-recorded pandemic worship services in our little computer room at home, and eating and drinking our own communion elements with Rachel – in some ways very private and individual and intimate – aware of God’s love for me personally, and yet also more attuned to all the rest of you doing the same things in your homes, especially as we shared the photos for our communion cups and plates with each other in the newsletter.
• I remember receiving communion at some points in life when there were tough things going on, illness, worries, burdens, and that act of receiving and sharing bread and cup was true grace in my life.
I remember. You remember and have your own stories and layers of meaning. We remember, as we collectively come together to share in this meal that comes as a gift from Jesus and a sign of God’s love and presence with us. This ritual is deep and wide, personal and communal, local and global, serious and joyful. It reminds us that we belong to the one who created us, and that through communion we become a part of the great cloud of witnesses who have faithfully given their lives to God and followed the way of Jesus. Communion ultimately is a gift from God, a gift of life. So today, as we approach communion, we remember.
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. May it be so. Amen.