I go to a small church. Everyone knows more than they need to abut everyone else, we sit pretty much one family to a row, and our sanctuary is also our fellowship hall. When I was very young (through mid elementary school) my family went to a large Methodist church, then my dad went to seminary in the middle of nowhere, and we got to see lots of different back woodsy and small town churches. Once we moved back to civilization (around 7th/8th grade for me), we started going to the church we currently attend.
One thing about this church that is different to any other church I remember is we take our Communion sitting in our seats. Ushers pass trays of bread and juice down the rows, you take your piece of bread and wait until everyone is served, the pastor says a little something, we take the bread together, repeat with juice cups. You have no idea how bad I wish I could say juice boxes, then it would sound like snack and Dane Cook's depiction of Communion would be complete. Jes-itz and juice. That could be a sacrilegious rap song title.
Anyway, our church has gone back and forth between cubed sandwich bread and the nasty little cardboard Communion chicklets for quite some time, and I can't take it any longer. So this weekend I made bread for Communion.
My parents told me someone at church suggested we use unleavened bread like we are supposed to, because apparently that's how it's supposed to be done. I don't know, I'm not an expert. So, I found a recipe for unleavened bread, I whipped it up, it looked and felt nasty. I sent a text my dad to ask about why we are supposed to use unleavened bread, he did go to seminary, he should know this stuff.
And this is how it went:
FLESH?! Seriously?! I know that the bread symbolizes the body of Christ but does it need to taste like I'm chewing on him? That just doesn't seem right. I'm not going to be able to think about anything but chewing on flesh during Communion for the rest of my life. It won't matter that this is a sacred reminder that Jesus died and rose again, I'll be there chewing on my little ball of flesh bread, and cringing. Thanks, Dad!
In the end we didn't even have Communion on Sunday. We Skyped with one of our missionary families in Africa instead. So I took my CranGrape juice and bag of fleshy bread home. Hopefully, I'll recover a little by the next Communion Sunday, pray for me, I obviously need it.
