We say we hold the Sacrament near and dear and have the highest esteem for the Lord's gift of His Body and Blood. For this reason, we are very careful to make sure the communion rail is close(d). We spend a great deal of time crafting a communion statement which says what we believe and evangelically tells those who are not of the same faith or fellowship not to approach the altar without speaking to the pastor first. We ask our people to sign up either the week before or during the service as if this is sufficient preparation to receive the Lord's Body and Blood (a good way to report communions to the church office but a terrible way to prepare ourselves to eat the flesh of Christ and drink His blood). We make sure that we have the general confession before Holy Communion so that only the absolved approach the Lord's Table as communicants worthily (even though we say that he is worthy who believes these words given and shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins). We fight over whether the pastor faces the people or the East, what vestments should or could be worn or not, whether to chant or not, whether the Words of Institution are prayer or proclamation or both, whether bread must contain wheat, whether grape juice suffices for wine, whether wine should be grape or red or white or whatever.... we will fight about nearly everything. But in the end I am deeply suspicious of all our talk.
I fear that what is really at stake is that we are not sure if we believe Christ's real presence and, if we do believe it, what to do with it. Why do I say it? Because nearly everything else we do in the celebration of the Sacrament vitiates against such Real Presence. Let me explain. Too many of our congregations consecrate enough to commune a month's worth of people. I cannot tell you how many times I have subbed in or served a vacancy and opened the host box only to find about 300 to 3000 more hosts than we would ever need. And what happened to all those we consecrated? The leftovers were certainly not given due reverence in a tabernacle but they were either given a holy place of honor in a leftover Cool Whip container or simply dumped back in with the unconsecrated as if consecration meant nothing at all. Too many of our congregations consecrate too much wine in flagons or cruets or too many of those nice little plastic cups. What happens to all those we do not use? Their contents are either dumped down the drain to meet the rest of the sewage of our lives or dumped on the ground as if it were not set apart for the Lord's use at all. And then the cups dropped into the trash like a dirty tissue. If we spill, we walk on it and clean it up later as if it were nothing. And when we get home, we dump the dirty laundry of purifcators in with our soiled undies along with a little Clorox.
But, God forbid, all hell will beak loose if someone we do not know shows up at the rail to commune -- worse, heavenly help us, if that person is a card carrying member of the ELCA. I am not at all suggesting that we should have open communion but how can we justify the great concern given to those who are not part of our fellowship who come to the altar rail and then be so callous and unconcerned for the way we administer the Lord's Body and Blood during and after the service. Even if you are not convinced that the reliquae remain what Christ says they are and you believe that our Lord put an expiration date on His Body and Blood, at least they were the Body and Blood of Christ at one point. You cannot get all hot and bothered about close(d) communion and then shrug your shoulders about the indifference to the Real Presence as we administer it during and after the Divine Service.
My only conclusion is that we are not really being serious when we say we confess the Real Presence. For if we did everything concerning the Body and the Blood would carry equal weight and merit. When it does not, there can be only one conclusion. We are either being inconsistent or hypocrites or we hold something in theory that in practice we do not observe. That remains the problem of the Sacrament among us but not among us only.
2 comments:
The WELS justifies this by a misapplication of the Nihil Rule: "Nothing has the nature of a sacrament apart from its intended use" - intended to counter the Catholic practice of Corpus Christi (etc). Instead, the WELS says that the post-communion elements were merely "set aside" by consecration and "were not used in the way the Lord intended and are not different than the supply of wafers and wine ready to be consecrated for future Holy Communion services"
https://wels.net/faq/follow-up-question-to-unused-communion-elements/
In other words, functional receptionists.
The LCMS Theology and Practice of The Lord's Supper (CTCR, May , 1983) states:
"The consecrated elements which remain after all have communed should be treated with reverence. This reverence has been expressed by Lutherans in various ways. Some have followed the ancient practice of burning the bread and pouring the wine upon the earth. Others have established a basin and drain-piscina-specifi~ally for disposal of the wine. The elders or altar guild may also return the consecrated bread and wine to specific containers for future sacramental use, or the elders and pastor can consume the remaining elements. All of these practices should be understood properly. The church is not, thereby, conferring upon the elements some abiding status apart from their use in the Lord's Supper itself.
"Biblical practice keeps the elements in their sacramental setting. Our Lutheran Confessions, quoting from the Wittenberg Concord (1536), are lucid in their rejection of any view which would confer some extraordinary status upon the elements apart from their sacramental use:
"They confess, in accordance with the words of Irenaeus, that there are two things in this sacrament, one heavenly and the other earthly. Therefore they maintain and teach that with the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ are truly and essentially present, distributed, and received . And although they deny a transubstantiation (that is, an essential change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ) and do not believe that the body and blood of Christ are locally enclosed in the bread, or are in some other way permanenlly united with it apart from the use of the sacrament, they grant that through sacramental union the bread is the body of Christ, etc. For they do not maintain that the body of Christ is present apart from the use, as when the bread is laid aside or reserved in the tabernacle or carried about and exposed in procession, as happens in the papacy" (FC SD VII, 14-15). [21]
Footnote 21: The problem with the "consecrationist-receptionist" discussion is that each side runs the risk of separating in one direction or the other what has been Biblically joined together.
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