Session 11 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 11 

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

Part 7:  Holy Eucharist

A major crisis in life is the social crisis of the maintenance of community.  How do communities stay together?  How do they attain viability so that they achieve an identity as a social group that in turns provides identity and story for membership to achieve the value structures for their lives?  What happens when family, tribe or village or city does not provide a social group to help persons negotiate their identity and purpose within the larger society?  People cannot live as simply detached from community and people need communities that perform a mediating function in their lives with their communities at large.

In a family life there is something very formative about the family meal.  A family meal sustains the life of a family in a very practical way: the provision of food.  The family meal necessitates a gathering and provides the occasion for human fellowship, the sharing of story and identity.  The Holy Eucharist is the Christian family meal and when people gather for the Holy Eucharist one can find the most concrete social expression of the reality of what we call the church.

The Holy Eucharist arose out of the meal traditions that were received from ancient Hebrew religion and forms of Judaism that developed in subsequent history, particularly during the times of exile when the community lost a temple based religion.

In the tradition of Christianity, one can find that the early Christ communities practiced meal gatherings that also  included prayer and commentary and preaching on Scripture.  As they tried to reconstruct the origins of their religious meals traditions they used an oral tradition that we call the Last Supper.  This meal tradition that was explained in various ways including using the “manna” or bread from heaven tradition in Hebrew Scripture became the basis for how worship was constituted on the first day of the week.  The arising of the practice of Eucharist occurred in communities that understood that Jesus was indeed the Messiah.  The Christ communities practiced in their lives the experiential return of Christ as the reality of his resurrection in what was known to be the presence of the Holy Spirit. Christ was known to have a particular presence in the effervescence of the gathered worshipers.  The intentional gathering and the repeating of the words of Christ over bread and the wine was known to be an experience of being constituted or mystified as the body of Christ and so they practiced a presence of Christ in the bread and the wine.  This meal at certain times was connected with real eating for hunger needs too and so the community was given a public gathering to eat together and to make sure that everyone in the community had something to eat.  It was truly a spiritual, social and physical life giving event.

As the Christ communities became comprised by more Gentile members  and as worshipers received and  provided food in other “non-communitarian” gatherings, the Eucharist became more of a highly stylized meal where the bread and wine stood alone apart from other food in having spiritual meaning for the community.  This does not mean that Eucharist cannot and should not still have vital connection with actually feeding people who are in need of food.

We continue to practice today this ancient Eucharistic tradition.  Some traditions have almost made the bread and wine into separate and individual objects of veneration and divorced from the gathered church while other traditions have minimized the importance and the frequency of the Eucharist.

In the Episcopal Church, we have continued this ancient pattern of regarding the Eucharist to be the constituting gathering of the church on Sunday.  Along with the ceremonial that pertains to the bread and wine, we have the accompanying context of the words through the reading of Scripture, the prayers, the confession, the proclamation of forgiveness, the Peace of making ourselves reconciled with each other before receiving communion, and the sermon as a way of teaching and applying the Scripture, tradition and reason to our everyday lives.  Perhaps the most important part of the Eucharist ironically is the dismissal to go into our everyday lives carrying with us the Eucharistic values that we have practiced in our gathering.  The Eucharist arises from our lives, and is a particular and intense invocation of God’s Spirit upon us and the ministry of our lives and it is a sending of us into the world to live as a Eucharistic people in the world.  

Exercise:

Do you remember your first communion?  Why is communion special to you?  How do you understand or appropriate the Presence of Christ in the bread and the wine?  Do you ever associate the Eucharist with people in the world having enough to eat?  Do you understand the connection of the Holy Eucharist with your everyday life and the importance of the dismissal at the Eucharist?  Do you understand how people gathered at Eucharist are the most concrete expression of the social nature of the church?  Have you ever had some special experiences at Communion?

Remember one of the Baptismal vow questions:  Will you be faithful in the apostles teaching, the breaking of the break and in the prayers?

We will with God’s help!

Father Phil