Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

communion

Theology Girl Gets Churched

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I’ve made this admission in many times and places, but here it is again:

Over the last three or four years, my church attendance has been…sporadic, at best.

It’s been a long time now since I lost my church during seminary over the excommunication of a friend. After that, I sort of lost the will to live as a church person; I moved, traveled, and got married over the next couple of years; and I started actually looking forward to Sunday mornings—lazy breakfasts and beach trips.

Once I got out of the habit of going, I saw the churches I did visit through new eyes. It seemed that few congregations could have really answered the question—what are we doing here?

As a kid, I would’ve said that church is a place to learn about God and sing. But those are things I can do on my own, or in the car, or with my family.

Later church came to mean communion; but I got used to participating in that ritual without belonging to a particular organization.

And along the way, the words and actions of these church people around the country came to seem weirder and weirder, like I had accidentally stepped, uninitiated, into a clubhouse—and it was too often immediately apparent that I wouldn’t fit in as a member of the club. I cuss too much; Nate and I don’t wear boots and boat shoes; I don’t treat the right people with suspicion; I ask too many questions; I talk about Jesus too much; I’m not impressed by the right things.

Belonging to that club wasn’t exactly a compelling reason to give up my Sunday mornings.

After all this, I’m more aware than ever that our language can serve as a dividing line: if you know the code, you’re in. If church words make you groan, scratch your head, tune out, or panic—you’re out.

Even though that fact sometimes makes me want to start over from square zero—no church words allowed—I also realize that many of the words we flippantly use once had deep meaning for people. If we got rid of them, eventually we’d build up a whole new vocabulary to name the same experiences.

Now that I’m helping to start a church, what I really want to do is turn these words from dividing lines into meeting places. Maybe we can pull some things apart and find a way to recover the truth, the feeling, the richness hidden inside. Those who can’t stand to go to church and those who can’t imagine leaving it could both be surprised.

Like some others before me, I want to go word by word through my own journey as I navigate this whole returning-to-church thing. The (Un)Systematic Theology Project will shape and inform it all.

I had to start with my own job title. Hop over to the Two Rivers blog to poke at discipleship with me?

And tell me in the comments—what’s the worst church word? what’s your favorite word to describe God?

Where were you on the night he was betrayed?

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I am not at all convinced that I won’t become Catholic or Orthodox someday. I love the Great Feast of Eucharist; the sense of tradition that connects us to so many places and times; the seasons, feasts, and fasts that we Episcopals are a bit lax about keeping. But if I do stay Anglican, it will be because Communion was enough. I need—I believe we all need—faith to come to us in bread and wine.

Because I love Eucharist so, much of the more terrible church-related pain in my life has been Communion-related: people denying one another Eucharist for reasons I saw as unfair. But through these great hurts, because I love Eucharist so, I understood, too: not the desire to become a gatekeeper, exactly, but to protect something sacred from a flippant and entitled world.

In my first year after college, I worked for a beautiful and holy and love-dealing church who taught me very much by being Christ to me, My main complaint was that this church did not have Communion near often enough, and when they did there was something I found disturbing. The ten or so kids in the congregation went zooming around the church whenever any activity took place, which was fine, except that it was the same during Communion—and they would sort of rip off hunks of bread as they passed by. They seemed to have no sense at all that this was special bread, and something inside me felt a physical jab whenever a piece was hacked off, crumbs flying. I wanted them to care about Jesus’s body. I think there is much to be gained by receiving something as a gift, in both hands; by learning solemnity.

I think of those kids when we have debates about who can be a part of church. It seems keeping people out often comes with good intentions, the desire to do things “decently and in order.” And even when you understand why people want to invoke grace, you also want to protest—in one sense, I know that it is silly to believe the attitude, knowledge, holiness with which I approach the Lord’s table each week is so very much greater than those kids’. Still, that seems like no reason to do nothing. Shouldn’t the church at least try to offer our best when we obey Jesus’ commandment to remember him?

Remember me, Jesus would whisper when those kids made me anxious. It is a gift. It was a gift even on that night when he was betrayed, offered to the clueless, the halfhearted, the sleepy, the deniers and the betrayer. He did not say take a decorous amount and eat, only Take, eat; this is my body. Did one of them giggle at the strangeness of these words, the nervousness of hearing him insist he would soon die? Did the servants, perhaps, gather up the remnants like the unbaptized do after Orthodox service—and was it not life to them as well?

When I remember Jesus, I am compelled to take this bread with fear and trembling; and whatever children are in my charge will be taught to do the same. But when we remember Jesus, we are also steered firmly into the grace business, into giving even when giving is indecorous. On the night when he was betrayed, Jesus said, over and over, keep my commands and my command is this: that you love one another. And he washed feet. And he did not want to be honored or protected.

So  when it comes to impertinent children, sinners and doubters and outsiders, I am hard pressed to say we should not err on the side of take and eat. If it makes us wince to have our sense of ceremony violated; even if we want to cry don’t do it! when the chief of sinners reaches out to touch his body, let us not take up swords of defense but instead go with that offender a second mile. Let us take hands, ask questions, and find in the end that (of course) the chief of sinners is us. We do not remember Jesus best by limiting our tables; we meet the humble Lord every time he is broken and shared again. Here is a debt that cannot be repaid by respectability, but might be honored by scandal. Here is Eucharist: given to us in our unworthiness, reawakening us to thanksgiving.

fasting is not a Whole30

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I was grateful for Communion last night because I was painfully hungry. This is not a metaphor. Accidentally failing to eat enough for supper yesterday is about the closest I will get to fasting for a while because of some meds I’m on. It is, I admit, a relief, but it would also be easy. Traditional. Comforting, in a way, if I were able—not to “choose a fast”—just to not eat sometimes for Lent.

I rarely come to Lent knowing how I should move through this season. Perhaps the main reason is that repentance and self-examination are the things I do best, by which I mean my inner life generally fluctuates on some scale between self-criticism and self-improvement until God is shaking me by the shoulders going SNAP OUT OF IT! Usually, as everyone around me is talking about mindfulness and tough love, I’m feeling a sneaking suspicion that I’m supposed to repent of navel-gazing.

For a long time I loved Lent for precisely this reason, that it appeals to my natural religious instincts. If you’re Protestant, it generally goes something like this: someone asks you what you’re giving up for Lent, and then you feel guilty that you didn’t remember it was coming up. Then you muse about for a few days asking yourself what you should be doing better at. You don’t ask anyone else, and if you’re like me you sort of halfheartedly pray about it while continuing to stick this semi-imaginary burden squarely on your own shoulders. After perhaps wondering for a while how much, exactly, God cares about your extra ten pounds, you settle on giving up something you’ll miss, but which won’t disrupt your life too much.

Of course, being a religious overachiever, I got tired of that and decided to Do a Hard Thing a few years ago. I ate only fruits, vegetables, rice, and beans, and bought food for my food pantry with the money I saved. I don’t know if that sounds really noble and intense, but it wasn’t that hard; I would console myself, not with prayer and worship, but with thoughts of how many calories I was saving. I never really prayed for the world’s poor all that much, either. I was disappointed. I’d Done The Thing, but God hadn’t Changed My Life in return.

The gospel of self-improvement can function in much more subtle ways than we expect. Let me be clear that I am still operating this way when I say that the way white Protestants do Lent is often more reflective of upper-middle-class white culture than it is of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We love 30-day challenges, don’t we? Self-improvement is so much a part of our culture that we readily map those concepts onto Lent. Then we’re simultaneously happy to have “earned” an extra-big slice of cake at the end of the forty days—and, eventually, frustrated that our fast once again didn’t seem to have much to do with Easter.

Some of my friends are Orthodox. They fast from dawn until the end of the service every Sunday. They fast full days several times a year. And for Lent, they are encouraged to do without meat, fish, eggs, dairy, oil, or alcohol. Maybe that sounds like setting yourself up for failure; I think maybe that’s the point. When everyone in the community participates in the same fast, failure and success take on new meanings. Your spiritual practice is no longer about you and your “growth”; it’s about the life of the community and the work of God.

Maybe by next Lent I will have such a community. For now I have only conviction: to fast in a way that is not about me. To learn to lean on God. Success or failure will not be keeping my rule with perfection, or making some kind of personal breakthrough. To succeed is to disrupt my seamless rhythms enough to remember how to look for God breaking through the newfound cracks.

This winter has been, in some big ways, a season of loss for me, and so for Lent I’m taking on a couple of new practices. At the service yesterday, though, my mind raced with those old thoughts—shouldn’t I give something up? how can I call this a fast? have I repented enough today? And then came the Psalm.

O Lord, open my lips,
    and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you have no delight in sacrifice;
    if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

As the priest prayed that God would enable us to serve him in peace of mind, I did not wonder whether I deserved any such thing. I made off with that blessing and carried on with things because what I deserve is ashes and dust; but what God gives is bread and wine and blessing and grace.

May your fast, whatever it is, convince you only of abundance.