You Set The Table And Never Eat

She takes hers last, standing, out of the tray, on her way past the front row to put the cloth back on.

That is not a rule anybody made. It is just how the choreography of that room has settled over eleven years. She says the words. She breaks it. She hands the trays to the four people who take them along the rows, and she watches from the front while a hundred people receive, and she loves that part and always has. And then the trays come back, and there is a leftover piece and a small amount left in the cup, and she takes hers while she is tidying.

Last month she noticed she had swallowed it before she had thought about it at all.

Not irreverently. That is not who she is. She simply put it in her mouth the way you eat something off a plate while you are washing up, and then she was folding the cloth, and it was only when she got to the second corner of the fold that she realized what she had just done and could not remember doing it.

She stood there holding a cloth for a bit longer than necessary.

And here is what she has been sitting with since. For eleven years she has laid this table and never once sat down at it. Not literally, not liturgically, but in whatever the real sense of that phrase is. She has administered a meal she has not eaten, month after month after month, and last month her body finally admitted it by swallowing without noticing.

There is a small hard fact underneath that, and she has not said it to anybody. She cannot remember the last time communion did anything to her. She could tell you what it means. She could preach on it for forty minutes without notes. But the last time it went through her rather than past her is somewhere back before the building work, and that was six years ago.

They did not know until afterwards

There are two people walking to a village called Emmaus on the afternoon of the resurrection. They do not know it is the afternoon of the resurrection. They think it is the day after the end of everything.

A man joins them and walks seven miles with them, and expounds all the Scriptures concerning himself, and they do not recognize him for a single step of it.

Then this:

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.Luke 24:30-31

Notice the shape of that. He was the guest. They invited him in, they made the meal, they set the table, and then at the table he took the bread and blessed it and broke it and handed it to them, and the guest turned out to be the host.

And notice the timing, because the timing is the thing for you. They said afterwards, did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us by the way? Afterwards. During the seven miles their hearts were burning and they had no idea who was next to them. The recognition was not available in the moment. They only found out what they had been in when it had finished.

So hear this over you, holding a folded cloth: you have not been outside that meal for eleven years. Not one month of it. That is not my comfort; it is what His word shows about two men who did not recognize the Lord for seven miles while He was talking to them, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who takes an Emmaus road and lays it down the aisle of a building you know too well.

Now let me take the phrase off you, because it is the phrase that hurts.

Laying the table and never eating. It is a good image and it is nearly right, and the piece it gets wrong is the piece that matters. In that room the host is not you. It never has been. The bread on that table belongs to somebody who took it and blessed it and broke it in an upstairs room and handed it round, and you are holding the tray for Him.

Which means you are not the caterer at a meal you are excluded from. You are one of the people at the table, holding the tray, and the moment you take yours standing up with a cloth in your other hand is not a lesser communion. It is exactly as much His body as the one the woman in the fourth row received sitting down with her eyes shut.

You are fed on the last Sunday of every month whether or not one thing in you registers it. His word puts the giving in His hands and never once makes the receiving depend on what the receiver can feel, and the Holy Spirit does not check a person's chest before He meets them.

And I want to say something about the six years, gently, because you have been reading it as a verdict.

A thing can go through you and not be felt for a very long time. The men on that road had no evidence at all during the walk. What they had was a burning they could not identify and a conversation they could not place, and the identifying came at the end, in a house, at a table, in a gesture they had seen before.

You may be six years into a road and still walking.