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One Sunday morning back in December 2020, I skipped church to visit my parents in hospital.

Dad had broken his hip in an accident at home and then, while still in hospital recovering, shattered his femur in a second fall. And then Mum, while visiting Dad in hospital, suffered what the doctors initially thought was a stroke. So when Sunday morning came, they were still in different wards of the same hospital, unable to visit each other, unable to get to their own church, and unfamiliar with the technology that they would need to use to watch their church’s livestream service. I decided that the best thing I could do under the circumstances would be to skip my own church’s Sunday morning gathering, drop in on Dad and set him up to watch his church’s livestream on one device, then go across to the ward where Mum was and watch the same service on a second device that I’d brought in with me.

It all went more or less to plan. We logged into the livestream service through our separate devices, in separate wards of the hospital, and listened to the minister preach about resurrection, embodiment and the gospel from 1 Corinthians 15. There were prayers for our nation and our world, and for various members of the congregation including Mum and Dad. And then—taking us somewhat by surprise—the minister announced that they would be celebrating the Lord’s supper. We watched on the screen as he led us in a prayer of general confession and the words of institution, before peeling back the foil lid from an individually pre-packaged wafer and grape juice serving with his latex-gloved hands and asking for a pile of similar packages to be distributed by his masked and gloved assistants.

Sinning Boldly

My mind immediately spun into overdrive, revisiting all the standard questions about communion, embodiment and church gatherings that the pandemic had thrown up for all of us across the previous months. Is it really the Lord’s Supper if we’re not eating it together, sitting at the same table, breaking from the same loaf and drinking from the same cup (or even from the same tray of tiny individual shot-glasses)? Is it better to celebrate some sort of cut-down, online, gloved and face-masked version of the Lord’s Supper, or not to celebrate it at all?

My spinning thoughts eventually landed on my memories of a letter that Martin Luther wrote to his friend, Philip Melanchthon, in the early days of the German reformation. Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg castle after his trial before the Emperor at Worms. Melanchthon, it seems, had written to him from Wittenberg with a string of anxious questions that had arisen in his absence:

  • What should you do if the program of reforming the church was not yet rolled out completely in some places, and practices were taking place that were inconsistent (or imperfectly consistent) with Scripture?
  • What if the authorities in the town where you were living wanted the priest celebrating communion to withhold the wine from the people and give them only the bread?
  • What if a wealthy patron requested the celebration of a private mass, to be said by the priest in a side-chapel and accompanied, perhaps, by prayers for the dead? Etc, etc.

Luther opens his Bible and tries to figure out the best answers he can to Melanchthon’s questions. From now on, if Luther is asked to celebrate a private mass, he plans to say no. Those who are compelled by the authorities to receive an imperfect communion are not sinning if they take the bread but are not offered the wine. And so on. 

Sometimes, uncertainty and fear might tempt us to play it safe by standing still and doing nothing. But Luther will have none of that.

But that’s not where he stops. His letter continues, acknowledging that obedience sometimes involves difficult choices in complex circumstances. Sometimes, uncertainty and fear might tempt us to play it safe by standing still and doing nothing. But Luther will have none of that. If making a decision and taking action involves the risk of making a mistake and taking the wrong action, then Luther says, take that risk!

If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.[1]

Emboldened by Luther, I grabbed what I could and, after checking with Mum, we ate and drank in sync with the faces on the screen. In our case, the meal consisted of a fragment of Stollen, broken off from what was left of a gift I’d brought that morning, and a sip of water in a plastic cup poured out from the tap in the hospital corridor.  

Was it the Lord’s Supper? Probably not, in any full and proper sense: just our own irregular, improvised memorial, giving thanks for the presence of the Lord Jesus in the hospital room with us and lamenting our separation from people that we loved and belonged to. A few crumbs gathered up from beneath the communion table, perhaps.

It was over in a moment, but the memory sticks with me a little over a year later, and I continue to reflect on it from time to time. For me, as for all of us, the two-year-long disruption of the pandemic has stimulated a whole new round of the “how to do church” conversation. And I’m glad that it has. At one level, my reflections on that Sunday morning in the hospital ward belong to that conversation. I hope that experiences like this (which all of us have had) have heightened our awareness of Christians for whom distance and isolation are permanent barriers to fellowship.

But the experience has stuck with me in another way, too. The events that we celebrate and remember in the Lord’s supper remind us of what’s most important. Sure, we should conduct our gatherings in a manner that is as faithful as possible to the teaching of Scripture. But at the end of the day, the one whose worship really matters is the Lord Jesus, with whom we are united not by our own merit or performance but by an empty-handed, undeserving faith.

At the most fundamental level, we come to the table (and to every aspect of our gatherings) not as performers of a perfect piece of religious theatre, but as hungry, weary, grace-dependent children, needing to be fed:

We do not presume to come to your table, merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness,
but in your manifold and great mercies.

We are not worthy
so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table.
But you are the same Lord
whose nature is always to have mercy.

Grant us, therefore gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood,
that we may evermore dwell in him,
and he in us. Amen.[2]

In the days ahead, we will still need to keep working through all the questions (including some quite tricky and complicated ones) that the pandemic has added to the “how to do church” conversation. I hope we have those conversations well, and that we think carefully about the way our practices should be shaped by Scripture and centred on the gospel.

But I hope, too, that in the midst of all that, we have an ever-deepening awareness of the grace that is at the heart of the gospel we preach. And I hope, too, that the grace we rely on for ourselves will spill over into humility, generosity and patience in our dealings with others as we work these things through. Because we are all, when everything is said and done, unworthy of even the crumbs beneath the table that we are invited to sit at.


[1] Letters I, “Luther’s Works,” American Ed., Vol 48. pp. 281–82.

[2] The “Prayer of Humble Access,” as adapted in An Australian Prayer Book from the version in the Book of Common Prayer

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