If you’re here on a Sunday morning, right after the Words of Institution (“On the night in which He was betrayed, our Lord Jesus Christ….”) and right before people come up to receive communion, you will hear something to the effect of “we believe that this meal is truly the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, in, with, and under the bread and the wine, and we believe that you believe that as well if you are to commune with us, and that you see us as brothers and sisters in Christ.” Additionally you’ll note that our bulletin says that we see taking communion at University Lutheran is an act affirming the beliefs of our local church as a manifestation as the Body of Christ. “If you’re not ready for that commitment, please cross your hands over your chest, and you will receive a blessing.”
This differs greatly from when I was invited to communion at another place where the pastor simply laid out some bread and some (probably grape juice), and without any Words of Institution or anything describing what was taking place, simply said, “we’re going to do communion now, so if you want to, please come up.” I’m not entirely pleased with my own communion statement on Sunday mornings, but at least it’s better than that.
So why do we “do communion” the way that we do, and not the other way? Well, it mostly has to do with how we read what the Bible says about communion. The big places we go to learn about communion in the Bible are Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 24, and 1 Corinthians 11. In those readings we believe that we see a couple of things going on in the text: 1.) Jesus is making it clear that this meal is a participation in His real Body and Blood, 2.) This meal is meant for people who believe together.
Most Lutherans are ok with #1, that Jesus is clear about His Body and Blood being present in communion. Luther famously wrote “hoc est corpus meum” (this is My body) in chalk on a table with someone that he was debating with to show the deliberate simplicity with which Jesus was talking about His presence in communion. Some Lutherans will unfortunately talk about this as “only a spiritual presence” which isn’t exactly helpful. The words “in with and under” that you hear here every Sunday morning are the three prepositions that are used in our Book of Concord, the baseline of Lutheran theology. Using them all together shows both that the Body and Blood are there, but also that there is a sense of mystery about that – because we don’t know of many other things that can simultaneously be “in, with, and under” something.
Where Lutherans tend to fight, however, is in terms of #2, “this meal is meant for people who believe together.” Some Lutherans say that believing together means being Baptized, some say it should be around what we believe communion itself is, some say that it has to do with the general beliefs of the local church (we here at University Lutheran are in that latter category, by the way). Some Lutherans will call this “closed” or “close” communion. I’m not sure those terms by themselves are always helpful either to members of Lutheran churches or to guests – but they at least come from good places of understanding.
“Close” (think “proximity”) communion refers to the idea that the people taking communion together are “close” in terms of their belief. We see this in the Bible in that the disciples who first had communion with Jesus were a close worshiping community together who believed the same stuff that Jesus was telling them. We also see it in what Paul says about communion in 1 Corinthians 11, “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.” That verse is the verse that also brings up “closed” communion, in that it has been the historic practice of the Church to not let people take communion if we’re afraid they have not “discerned the Body”. We take discerning the Body to mean both that recognizing that the Body of Christ and His Blood are there, and also “discerning the Body” meaning the manifestation of the Body of Christ in that local church. For this reason we celebrate communion with doors that are “closed” to people who might believe stuff that we think is harmful to them and/or people that don’t know enough about what we believe to take communion in good conscience. We catch a lot of flack for this, because we are drawing a hard line about what we believe is going on in communion, but we only draw that hard line because we believe that it’s a truly Scriptural line.
I know that this is long for a newsletter article already, but I have one more important thing to say. When I say, “if you’re not ready for that commitment please place your hands over your chest like so,” I really mean “commitment”. When we take communion, it’s the closest thing we have to an altar call…I mean,…it IS an altar call. It is a call to recommit yourself to the grace of God that saves you, a call to say all over again that it is only by an infusion of Jesus that you are made ready for eternity. It’s a commitment worth making, and worth making well. I hope that the next time you come up for communion it is with that sense of commitment.