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Advent-Christmas 1997 |
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C is for
Cup
Common cup? Individual glasses? Something in between, like intinction? Which mode of supping/sipping best fits The Holy Supper? Does that depend on who is being served? What if some of the communicants are infected with a communicable disease? The question arises here only to set the stage for the article after this one, "R-O Is For Rummy Offer." Before you read that you ought to know something funny about its author.
He is Pastor Brian Heinrich. Not only is he a favorite former student, he is one of the sweetest guys I know. Truth is, he reminds me of Jesus, though he would shyly deny that, if only because he is twice as tall as Jesus probably was. (C.S. Lewis once recalled how shocked he was to realize that his Lord was probably shorter than he was.) Brian is also guileless. (Wasn't Jesus?) His pastorate is among the poor and homeless in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia. His church sponsor is LUMS, Lutheran Urban Mission Society. It's said of Brian, The priest from LUMSAmong his Canadian colleagues and wherever he is known Brian has a reputation for being a stickler about proper liturgical form, "proper" meaning the tradition of the church catholic. Specifically, he stumps for the use of the common cup. But he is anything but squeamish. (Jesus wasn't either.) Brian's community at LUMS knows all this about him, and smiles understandingly. They know him most of all as one who cares deeply about the street people he serves. They are in effect his family. In fact he rather looks like them. (Didn't Jesus, too?) Recently, Brian was presiding at The Holy Communion at a nearby church where the custom was to use individual "shot glasses," as he disdainfully calls them. He declined to go through with the service until at least a compromise could be reached in |
the form of intinction. (All dip their wafers in the wine but still in a common cup.) As he explains, there were "qualms about drinking from a common shared vessel." Not that Brian doesn't understand those qualms. (You'll see why.) Nor is it the high rate of HIV infection that causes the concern but rather "contagion from other more viral and contagious diseases such as the various strains (A through G now!) of hepatitis." Now that you know this about Brian, how steadfastly he holds out for the common cup, you will (as he predicts) "smile or even laugh out loud" when you read his story which follows. The joke's on him and he can take it. Diseased communicants communicate more than communicable disease. rwb R-O Is For Rummy OfferAs I write these reflections at about halfpast August, Advent and Nativity seem far away. The lazy summer day makes it hard to focus on that distant contrasting season. But we have just celebrated the feast of "the falling asleep of the Mother of God," and through the open window I hear the belfry of |